I’ve been struggling with how my triadic framework for interpreting art works relates to C. S. Peirce’s categories. When I first developed my triadism (fleshed out in Ecologies of the Moving Image) into the non-Peircian terms of materiality, experience, and representation — which I did in the context of teaching a course on the environmental arts — […]

The latest issue of the open-access Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, an issue devoted to “Gilles Deleuze and Moving Images,” includes a review by Niall Flynn of my book Ecologies of the Moving Image. Another recent review of EMI can be found in the The Journal of Ecocriticism. And I’ve mentioned the Environmental Humanities […]

The third edition of the Environmental Humanities Book Chat features a discussion of my Ecologies of the Moving Image. Discussants include the Royal Institute of Technology’s Anna Åberg, organizer of the “Tales from Planet Earth” film festival and conference, Seth Peabody of Harvard University (and a Rachel Carson Center fellow), and moderator Hannes Bergthaller of National Chung-Hsing University (Taiwan) and Würzburg […]

The new issue of Film-Philosophy is out, and it includes my article “The Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine: Stalking the Zone of Cinema.” The abstract is below. The first half of the article is an early version of the paper I gave at the recent Moving Environments conference, which encompassed material from the first two chapters of my […]

Here’s a fragment from Chapter 3 of Ecologies of the Moving Image. This chapter covers cinema’s “geomorphism,” by which I mean the part of cinema’s world-making capacity, its becoming-world-ness, that presents us with an objectscape, a territory within which things happen and action occurs. This is in contrast to cinema’s “anthropomorphism” (a subset of “subjectomorphism”), which refers to the cinematic production and distribution of agency, the capacity to act (which is the film-world’s subjectscape). Between these two poles is the “biomorphic field,” the interactive liveliness within which subjectivation and objectivation are distinguished and separated from each other, moment to moment. [. . .]

It is here, in the factory -– the central production site of modernity, but here in its double aspect as organic-mechanical construction site and as imagistic and imaginal production workshop, the center from which images are produced and disseminated — that Prospero’s Books most literally takes place. Here is Jonathan Beller’s ‘cinematic mode of production,’ turned to the deconstructive ends of staging modernity’s own unraveling.